Wednesday, September 01, 2010

“And for your own sake I don’t think you want to overhear some of the things that happen.”

This next one’s bad. Real bad. So bad I don’t even really want to do a full review, but I’ll try. Here’s 1961’s Cold War “thriller” Rocket Attack U.S.A. an incredibly uninteresting piece of scare propaganda.

Plot
So the Soviets launched Sputnik and America fears it may be a spy satellite sent up to gather rocket data in preparation for nuclear war or something. A spy is sent to Moscow to rendezvous with a deep cover agent and they try to sabotage the Russian missile program, fail horribly, get killed and apparently provoke the Commie bastards into launching missiles at New York.

And it ends with a message saying ALL OF THIS COULD HAVE BEEN AVOIDED IF AMERICA HAD INVESTED IN A MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEM!

Seriously, that’s pretty much it.

CharactersJohn Manston: John McKay plays our CIA agent sent to Moscow. He ends up staying in the deep cover agent’s closet for a while and sets out to sabotage the missile silos.

Tannah: Monica Davis plays the deep cover agent who’s literally in bed with a Soviet general and getting all sorts of good…intel. Sadly, not a very good actress.

And that’s about it for main characters. These two get introduced a quarter of the way into the film and get killed off with a quarter of the film left to go. Then there’s some newscaster guy in New York and a whole bunch of incidental people around for only one scene here or there. Since selecting a badass is traditional at this point, I guess I’ll pick the blind guy nonchalantly walking down a New York street with air-raid sirens blaring who unconvincingly reaches out and says “help me” to some random guy who runs past him.

Visuals/Effects
Directed by Barry Mahon, the movie is a visual mess with sloppy editing and the rushed, low budget nature really shows (the missile silo is guarded by one easily dispatched guard).

Writing
There is no actual writing credit for the film, but IMDB lists Barry Mahon as the most likely candidate. Probably just as well the writer is anonymous since the story is a complete mess of scenes that just sort of happen and we get characters and plots introduced out of thin air that disappear just as quickly. It is quite bad.

Sound
No score or anything, though there is one scene in a Moscow restaurant/nightclub that has a band & dancer.

ConclusionRocket Attack U.S.A. is bad. Very bad. Not even entertaining bad. It’s boring and the lesson I learned is that better trained spies could prevent a need for a missile defense system. Ugh, though what do you expect from something made by “Exploit Films”? Dreadfully bad and to be avoided. Even the MST3K version is barely watchable.